Month: July 2018

Whenever I see her skunk-streaked hair and black eyes, I
feel broken eggshells under my feet. Oh fidget. I smile in
a pinch, that’s what my momma taught me, to be polite while
waiting in the line outside the old Flame movie theatre. She
yammers like we never left off, and I listen like I’m keeping
my lips just above rising water. I look up into the dull night
sky & see the red pulse of the weather satellite passing over. I
interrupt her spew. Sure feels like rain, I mutter, my clenched
fists shoved into my tight jean’s pockets.

M.J. Iuppa lives on a small farm near Lake Ontario’s shores. Check out her blog: mjiuppa.blogspot.com for her musings on writing, sustainability & life’s stew.

E, my 15-year-old daughter, has invited me to her therapy session. We sit side-by-side on a couch across from her psychiatrist. Her doctor stands and billows a sun yellow yarn blanket overhead, letting it fall on E’s lap where it’s tucked securely around her legs. Their comfort ritual.

I am a guest here.

E talks about her drive for perfection, how the gap between what-she-is and what-she-wants-to-be is vast. How her depression takes root there. Her eyes on her therapist, never on me. She reveals her fear of being abandoned and suddenly I am on guard, tallying up the ten thousand hours.

“Don’t you know I would never leave you?” I say. “I’ve always been right here.” I slap the couch cushion space between us. She looks at me now and where I expect fight I see despair.

The gap between what-she-thinks-I-am and what-I-think-I-am is vast.

I remember E when she was a few days old. We are back from the hospital: me, E, and her Dad. We have this bed called a co-sleeper, it’s a small crib attached to our bed so E can sleep close to us, and I can easily reach over to nurse in the night. We used it with her older sister M, and it worked very well. But E isn’t like M–she’s fussy. Doesn’t like to be out of my arms. Even being swaddled in the blanket won’t do. And of course it wouldn’t. After nine months of womb dark and warm, how could a blanket help? Her tiny body contains only one cup of blood.

Her Dad is different this time too. Easier to irritate. Tired, all the time. He’s deeper into his medical training than he was when M was born. Medical Board exams are coming up and we have to decide where he will pursue his fellowship. A big move away from our city with two young children. It’s daunting.

E cries a lot. She doesn’t like being separated from me. Our pediatrician is old school, been practicing for over forty years. “Let her cry it out,” he says. “Don’t breast feed her too much.”

So this time, the co-sleeper won’t work. E senses me so close and wants to be in my arms all night. It makes her Dad do this silent rage thing, an anger that needs no sound to go noticed. We move her to a big crib in a small room on the other side of our apartment. I can’t put anything in with her because she might suffocate so she’s just in pajamas. In the dark. So far away from me that we can’t even smell each other.

And she cries. Wails. Endlessly.

It turns my bones inside out. My breasts swell, dribbling milk.

I look forward to the nights her Dad is on call and has to stay over at the hospital. On those nights, E is in bed with me. She slips into my shell, our eyes lock, her lips purse against my nipple. We drift to sleep and stay that way for hours.

But most nights she is alone. Eyes wide to the dark, tiny balled up fists flailing. Her throat cried raw as breath becomes whimpers becomes silence which can mean anything but all of it is a kind of death.

Now, in her therapist’s office, I share this memory with E a few weeks shy of her Sweet Sixteenth birthday. The therapist—skilled, professional—even I can see her eyes widen a bit. “It’s no wonder.” We all agree. No wonder.

I ask E, “Can I hug you?” And she nods. I scoot across the cushions and cradle her in my arms. I pull back so she can look at me, I want her to see how deep this runs. “I am so sorry,” I say. She cries and I cry. In this moment, I’m not good mother, not bad mother. I’m witness. You did live these things and they are as you remember.

May and Tom were an attractively odd-looking couple. May wore suits she bought in thrift stores and fedoras she decorated herself, and Tom liked stripes. Both of them thought Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl got a bad rap. May could whistle with her fingers and make sounds like an owl with her cupped palms, and Tom could burp the alphabet but didn’t. He did, though, make bubbles on his tongue that floated a foot toward the sky before bursting. She read the dialogue in books out loud, even on the train. He had done ballet until he was seventeen and could still stand on his tippy toes.

They met at the housewarming party of mutual friends. Both of them gravitated fast to the kitchen and spent the night talking there over under and around people coming in to get beer or dip or glasses or a dustpan and brush. Their conversation wasn’t deep but it flowed well. They spent ten minutes keeping track of how many people entered the kitchen wearing something green vs something red. Red won. Another ten minutes inviting everyone who opened the fridge to take a swig from the tabasco sauce. If they did, May would take a swig with them. If they didn’t, Tom would take a swig alone. They went to a coffeeshop for ice-cream, then to May’s place. They listened to Kid Koala’s version of Moon River and watched on YouTube the English National Ballet perform to Queen songs. Tom stayed the night and in the morning while she took a shower he made the bed neatly and brewed her a cup of tea. More dates followed, then space cleared in each other’s cupboards, then a move to an apartment all of their own and tomato plants and fresh herbs growing on the fire escape.

“What do you think about children?” May asked.

“Not a fan,” said Tom. “Smelly, expensive, and a fifty-fifty chance you get a monster.”

“I’m pregnant.”

“That’s great! I always wanted children!”

May knew Tom was lying, and knew too he was lying because he loved her, and she felt a surge of love for him on account of this that was so strong it demanded a physical manifestation. She squee-ed!

(At the same time, she wondered if his decision to lie about wanting children would one day be a spike between them, the root of resentment, and so after she squee-ed she searched his face for the future, and squee-ed again until he squee-ed too.)

In the hospital she was giving birth in one room and another family were giving birth in the room across the way. “Are you filming it?” asked the father of the other family to Tom as they both grabbed coffees from the vending machine. “You’ve got to film it.”

“I don’t have a camera,” said Tom.

“Not even on your phone?”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“I’m sure you can find a camera somewhere. That’ll be with you forever.”

It took a thousand years between Tom putting the coin in the coffee machine and the coffee coming out.

“If I film it,” he said, “I’ll let you take a peek.”

Their daughter was gorgeous. Her eyes enormous and jet-black, like they belonged to a teddy bear instead of a baby girl. Tom thought he’d been in love with May, but holding his daughter he knew he could never love anyone as much as he loved this child, this girl he’d made all by himself. He told this to May, who said she felt the same way. But she couldn’t feel the same way – nobody could feel the same way Tom felt. Nobody ever had or ever would.

They called her Max.

She was deaf and they all learnt sign language. Sometimes Tom dreamt about him and Max making up their own sign language, that May wouldn’t know. If you combine our names, he said, you get Mom. Or Tax. She liked vegetables more than fruit. She’s a dancer, he said. She can be anything she wants to be, said May. She wants to be a dancer, said Tom. He held her with one arm and manipulated her feet into pointe with the other. You shouldn’t do that, said May. Tom didn’t say anything, but when May wasn’t around he didn’t stop.

May and Max were badly hurt in a car crash and Max’s legs would never be the same again. She’d never dance. Tom realized, belatedly, that the hospital had made a terrible mistake, mixing up his child with the daughter of that other family, the one who’d given birth across the room. He wrote to the hospital, email after email after email, and called them day and night, night and day. He refused a paternity test. He stopped going out. He saw families from the fire escape with daughters that could be his, daughters with two normal legs. It was some time before he realized May and Max had gone.

He got a fish he called Unconditional Love and forgot to feed it so it died.

He missed his dad so he called him, but the number was disconnected. It took him a week to find out he’d moved house a year ago and had a new number. He called the new number but when someone answered he remembered why he’d stopped talking to his dad, and he hung up without saying anything. When the phone rang back several times throughout the evening he ignored it. He’d never be able to answer the phone again.

He didn’t like his shoes anymore, so he threw them away, from the fire escape.

Then his pants.

His shirt, his tie, his socks, his glasses.

All he kept was the tomato plant, which had one sole cherry tomato, or one normal tomato that hadn’t yet grown the whole way.

Christopher James lives, works, and writes in Jakarta, Indonesia. He has previously been published online in many venues, including Tin House, Fanzine, McSweeney’s, SmokeLong, and Wigleaf. He is the editor of Jellyfish Review.